The characterization and remediation of lands contaminated with hazardous, toxic and radiological waste (HTRW), or with unexploded ordnance, poses enormous technological and operational challenges. The Department of Energy and Department of Defense each control millions of acres of potentially contaminated land. Some of these areas are contaminated and well-characterized, some are contaminated but uncharacterized, and others are merely suspect. Of those either contaminated or suspect, they range from bounded areas of several acres to unbounded areas of many hundreds of square miles.
Aerial photography may be used to survey these lands, but provides only inferential data. Most investigators use either hand-held or highly localized vehicle-mounted sensors. The data produced by these prior systems are then subjectively interpreted by an operator or processed off-line at a high cost of both time and money. In general, these methods are slow, labor-intensive and correspondingly expensive to deploy. It is an object of the present invention to overcome the problems with these prior surveying systems.